The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver by Rafael Torrubia review: 'bold, brassy, clever work'

My greatest regret as a judge for the 2013 Granta Best of Young British Novelists award was that China Miéville, the doyen of contemporary fantasy, was a year too old to be eligible. I will always prefer Pullman to Rowling. All this is to clarify that I came to The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver primed to enjoy the debut novel by Scots-Spanish writer Rafael Torrubia. And in a great many ways, I very much did enjoy it. One very minor quibble would be the map isn’t all that special. Miéville and I have often discussed the importance of a detailed, curious map in a fantasy book (his have none, of course).

The novel opens in an aftermath, or two aftermaths to be precise. A generation before the events in the novel, Shipwright and Shroundweaver had been instrumental in a revolution which overthrew the necromantic Emperor of Thell. As the story opens here, they are returning to the port of Hesper, fresh from having attempted to save the survivors of one of their vessels, the Volante. The Free City of Hesper is ruled by the charismatic Declan Fallon, whose wife is a mysterious coma and whose feckless son has absconded with his boyfriend, seeking a cure.

It should be noted here that there are other same-sex relationships in the novel, and the most important thing is that it passes without any comment whatsoever. This is not new in high fantasy – Miéville’s Iron Council has a gay couple as the protagonists; but what is worth noting is that it’s not deemed worth noting in the narrative. Fallon is an old comrade in arms from the overthrow of the Emperor; and Hesper’s armada has been besieging and cutting supplies to the cities of the south, where a new threat, the witch Crowkisser and her assassin lover, Slickwalker, has arisen.

With Fallon’s blessing, Shipwright and Shroudweaver are heading back to Thell, where the former insurgents they fought alongside have maintained an aggressively isolationist policy since the overthrow of the Emperor. If the Emperor terrified through possessing his subjects and their corpses, Crowkisser does something more frightening: inspires people to fight for her voluntarily. No wonder: she has already destroyed all the gods, burnt and ripped the sky, and stolen everyone’s names, Declan being one of the very rare few who held out against this new sorcery.

Torrubia is strong on world-building and drip-feeds the reader carefully. Any “info-dumps” are done in the context of another person needing to know, or as flashbacks. The characterisation in pleasingly gnarly. Shroudweaver is a carapace; sardonic, pessimistic, secretive; Shipwright is forthright, foul-mouthed, lusty, blustering to conceal tenderness. I wonder, since I didn’t give it away, when you read the names did you assume their genders? That the weaver is a man and the wright a woman is one of the graceful little startles, the “enstranging” which the great Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky thought was a defining characteristic of literature.

The pace rattles along thrillingly, and especially praiseworthy are the battle scenes. These are an underrated skill, and require precise co-ordination to move between the fronts, the anonymous troops and the various principal characters, to catch the ebb and flow of conflict. It has to be gritty without being gratuitous, and Torrubia’s scenes are excellent, particularly in the responses to different outcomes. It also helps that he is unafraid to actually kill characters. Too many modern fantasy authors fetishise and coddle their characters, and in a form where almost anything is possible, death has to have some form of reality and consequence. Likewise, the magic here is costly and complicated. It is a both a disappointment and a delight that the novel ends on such a cliff-hanger – 60 pages from the end, I realised with a groan that not everything would be resolved. The actual end has a massive cliffhanger: more the end of The Empire Strikes Back than A New Hope, and I hope Torrubia’s book deal is as strong as Shroudweaver’s bindings and that the reader is not left stranded as with so many cancelled series.

This is bold, brassy, clever work. It made me feel like my childhood self again.

The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver, by Rafael Torrubia, Gollancz, £25

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